"At noon comes my uncle Wight to dinner, and brings with him Mrs. Wight, sad company to me, nor was I much pleased with it, only I must shew respect to my uncle. "
18 months ago having Uncle Wight to lunch was a big deal. I'm guessing Mrs. Wight was a daughter, or she would have been called "my aunt". I'm more interested in how Bess felt about this visit.
"We have newes of Sir Jeremy Smith’s being very well with his fleete at Cales."
This being a stormy time of year, sailing from Cadiz to Portsmouth or London could take a long time -- or be very quick -- depending on the winds. Do we have any independent information on when Smith reached Cadiz?
"So Jane 'is very well and do well' and appears to be happy in her current place of employment, yet Sam still refers to her as 'poor wench.'"
I think the words 'poor' and 'wench' have more to do with the paternalistic, dismissive, condescending attitude men had to women (their chattels), in those days. Elizabeth was his 'poor' wife on January 12 when she had spent days sewing new damask hangings for their bedroom. Word like this are almost a substitute for praise. But such terms could never be applied to a woman with higher status.
It doesn't take much soul-searching to come up with similar attitudes today. Women are pushy when men are ambitious. Women are bossy when men are decisive. Women have an obsessed when men are focused, Women are angry when men are passionate. Fred Astaire was famous and very well paid for his dancing, but his sister had to do everything he did, backwards and in high heels -- Adele never made much money.
So come on, don't be mystified by Pepys' attitude -- it is familiar to us all today.
-- signed by the nice little woman at the office who does everything, including making the coffee and emptying the trash, for minimum wage, who was told at school she was too dumb to go to University.
Since Pepys is buyng tallow for the office, I think it was for candles. Until paraffin wax became available (what most candles are made of today), the poor had tallow (which smelt nasty) and the rich had beeswax. Because of the smell, a couple of winters back Pepys had insisted on beeswax candles. Recent economies have changed his lifestyle.
Churches used beeswax candles. The poor used rushes as wicks, making lights for themselves by dipping the rush in melted fat. Burning the candle at both ends meant just that: the rush was twisted up so both ends could be lit at the same time giving twice the light for half the time.
(Beeswax candles are easy to make if you have a good sheet of beeswax with straight edges - you simply put a length of cotton wick in the middle and roll it up, then cut in into sections if you want smaller candles. Cotton wicks give the best light and need to be twisted and doubled in order to not burn down too quickly and outrace the wax and get lost in the candle. But cotton wicks were yet to come.)
Had Pepys been buying tallow "for the King" or the Navy, the Salty One’s previous annotation on its uses would have been more likely: Tallow was important to running of a ship, preservation and cleaning , providing cheap lighting, keeping gun wheels running, and scrubbing decks.
Animal rendering, in other words. What the Joyce Brothers used to do for a living.
GOOD NEWS: According to Edward Vaughan's Wikipedia page:
"Vaughan married Letitia Hooker, the daughter of Sir William Hooker. Their son John (1670–1721), was created by William III in 1695, baron of Fethard County Tipperary, and viscount Lisburne, in the peerage of Ireland."
So Letitia survived this set back. No word on whether the baby did.
Sir John Lethieullier (1633, London – 4 January 1719, Lewisham) was a British merchant and businessman descended from Huguenots from the Spanish Netherlands. His parents were John le Thieullier and Jane de la Forterie or Delafort, born in Frankfurt and Brabant respectively. He was the eldest of their three sons. John le Thieullier moved to England in 1605. He settled initially in Ilford and then in Lewisham. He began by buying English textiles from East Anglia and the west of England with his business partner Charles Marescoe (husband to John's sister Leonora), superintending their dyeing and finishing and then exporting them to the Levant and southern Europe. He soon diversified and by 1669 was exporting tin and lead to Rotterdam and Venice as well as importing Portuguese sugar and Dutch iron. He became sheriff of London in 1675 and in 1693 bought Aldersbrook Manor in what is now east London. He is buried in the churchyard of St. Alfege Church in Greenwich. He married Anne Hooker at St. Clement's, Eastcheap on 18 May 1659. Their son John was the father of the antiquarian Smart Lethieullier. For more information: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sir…
Sir Thomas Hervey MP 1625-1694 -- Per L&M Companion: kt 1660. Of Ickworth, Suffolk; Vice-Chamberlain of the Household 1658; Extra Commissioner of the Navy 1665-1668; M.P. for Bury St. Edmunds March 1679-1690. His appointment to the Navy Board was a political one and he earns no praise from Pepys. On the other hand, his memorial in Ickworth church - and memorials do not always lie - records that he and his wife were 'most eminent examples of piety, charity and conjugal affection.'
Edward Hyde, Earl of Clarendon, in his autobiography, admits the "weakness and vanity" he had exhibited in the erection of [Clarendon] house, and "the gust of envy" which it drew upon him; while he attributes his fall more to the fact that he had built such a house than to any misdemeanor he was thought to have been guilty of.
John Wilmot, 2nd Earl of Rochester (Clarendon's second son) told Lord Dartmouth that when his father [CLARENDON] left England he ordered him to tell all his friends "that if they could excuse the vanity and folly of the great house, he would undertake to answer for all the rest of his actions himself." -- London, Past and Present. H.B. Wheatley, 1891.
Phil and Mary -- I think he's been even more devious than both of you say: He collected samples and gifts ... then invited the office over for a big lunch ... and then returned what he didn't need/like. There's very little new under the sun.
Weather report for 2019: My cousins near Windsor report snow on the ground, with the first snowdrops poking their brave first sprouts out of the frozen ground.
"... and no dinner provided for me ready ..." The operative word is READY. i.e. 'come back in an hour and you can have dinner at home.' 'But I'm hungry now.' 'Can't be helped -- the chicken was delivered late.' 'Okay ... I'm going out for dinner at Capt. Cocke's.' 'Good idea. I'll let Mrs. Pepys know what happened when she gets home."
As Pepys is so specific about the missing lunch, I suspect there was an unusual miscommunication today. The five staff need to eat, so Elizabeth being out does not necessarily cancel cooking. Pepys has eaten alone in his dining room before, but does not like to do so. Since reading was not a given, sending the boy with a message about lunch was probably more usual than leaving/sending a note. The boy could bring back information. All these options appear to have failed today.
Cock ale is different from normal ale: a rooster was cooked in ale, and somehow distilled into a drink which was very popular ... as an aphrodisiac. More on the subject at
"... and then home, all of us, for half an hour to dinner, ,,,"
No wonder he was buying pictures and silverware yesterday. He avoided giving an office party at Christmas, so this was an opportunity to return a lot of hospitality, and show off how well he was doing in a discrete way.
"It grieved me to see how slightly the Duke [of Albermarle] do everything in the world, and how the King and everybody suffers whatever he will to be done in the Navy, though never so much against reason, as in the business of recalling tickets, which will be done notwithstanding all the arguments against it."
L&M note: In this, Albemarle was pro and Pepys against the recall of these chits of uncertain value with which seamen had long been paid. I think prudence and equity were on the side of Albemarle, who, as a military man, was concerned about reliable and loyal manpower.
My feeling is that Charles II "martyred" his father as a way of 1. Dignifying his father's end; 2. Testing what it means to be "Defender of the Faith"; 3. Snubbing the Pope who did nothing to aid the Restoration; 4. Reassuring the English Roman Catholics that he had not strayed too far from the fold; 5. Defining the late struggles from the Royalist point of view.
Rather like Eisenhower adding "In God We Trust" to the currency during the Cold War to remind Good Americans why they fought Communism. Nothing like having God on your side of the argument.
"One thing I wondered about all through the last year of plague is what happened in Evelyn's infirmaries for prisoners of war. Were there any outbreaks? I would have supposed an outbreak would have been lethal in such conditions. But maybe they didn't contain plague carriers."
Assuming Terry is correct in saying that "Already half the accommodation at three London hospitals (St. Bartholomew's, St. Thomas's and the Savoy) was reserved for the wounded, but the greater number were boarded out" (and he usually is correct), I have to assume they had the plague in the hospitals too.
1. The Dutch had had their own outbreak 2 years earlier, and in the unsanitary coditions on board war ships, it only takes one sick sailor to take down the entire ship. 2. Maybe all these sailors were originally wounded but not plague-ill ... the people coming in to care for them were all exposed to the plague and must have brought it into the hospitals and boarding places.
I don't KNOW this for sure, but I can't imagine a way to isolate these wounded men.
Denzil, Baron Holles of Ifield, who was a good French scholar, was sent as ambassador to France on 7 July, 1663. He was ostentatiously English, and a zealous upholder of the national honor and interests; but his position was rendered difficult by the absence of home support.
And I like the A Biographical History of England. J. Granger, 1779 note: "... He refused the insidious presents offered him by Louis XIV with as much disdain as he had before refused 5000 1. offered him by the parliament, to indemnify him for his losses in the civil war.”
I wonder what Louis XIV was trying to bribe him to do. Wrong guy!
Holles had a tough assignment because after the Restoration, Charles II's instincts were to exercise a serious role in European affairs, and his new government was sensitive to unflattering comparisons with the influence which the Commonwealth and Protectorate had wielded abroad, and the Restoration regime was a fragile one. Charles' desire to cut a figure abroad had to be tempered by an appreciation of the costs of international power politics and the threat it could pose to internal security.
Both France and Spain solicited an English alliance.
The Franco-Spanish War had been ended by the Treaty of the Pyrenees in 1659, but the politics of western Europe was still bound up with their continuing rivalry. Plus the Spanish expected some dividends from the support they had given the exiled monarchy in the late 1650s, so in July 1660 Charles II formally ended the war with Spain which had been carried on fitfully since Cromwell's death.
Although Spain had advocates at the English court, it lacked the closeness Charles II's family ties gave him to France, plus it could not overcome Charles’ enthusiasm for French society and government.
Even so, France's 1654 treaty with Cromwell, and Cardinal Mazarin's disrespect of English Royalist interests had chilled relations between the two courts, and not until the death of Cardinal Mazarin in March 1661 did relations officially recover.
But by then the Franco-Dutch Treaty was as good as signed, and Louis XIV found himself reluctantly on the other side of the Anglo-Dutch War. However, as we have seen from the Diary, Louis was in no hurry to honor that Treaty. Presumably it was Hollis' job to keep France "on the fence".
Comments
Second Reading
About Sunday 18 February 1665/66
San Diego Sarah • Link
"At noon comes my uncle Wight to dinner, and brings with him Mrs. Wight, sad company to me, nor was I much pleased with it, only I must shew respect to my uncle. "
18 months ago having Uncle Wight to lunch was a big deal. I'm guessing Mrs. Wight was a daughter, or she would have been called "my aunt". I'm more interested in how Bess felt about this visit.
About Saturday 17 February 1665/66
San Diego Sarah • Link
"We have newes of Sir Jeremy Smith’s being very well with his fleete at Cales."
This being a stormy time of year, sailing from Cadiz to Portsmouth or London could take a long time -- or be very quick -- depending on the winds. Do we have any independent information on when Smith reached Cadiz?
About Tuesday 13 February 1665/66
San Diego Sarah • Link
"So Jane 'is very well and do well' and appears to be happy in her current place of employment, yet Sam still refers to her as 'poor wench.'"
I think the words 'poor' and 'wench' have more to do with the paternalistic, dismissive, condescending attitude men had to women (their chattels), in those days. Elizabeth was his 'poor' wife on January 12 when she had spent days sewing new damask hangings for their bedroom. Word like this are almost a substitute for praise. But such terms could never be applied to a woman with higher status.
It doesn't take much soul-searching to come up with similar attitudes today. Women are pushy when men are ambitious. Women are bossy when men are decisive. Women have an obsessed when men are focused, Women are angry when men are passionate. Fred Astaire was famous and very well paid for his dancing, but his sister had to do everything he did, backwards and in high heels -- Adele never made much money.
So come on, don't be mystified by Pepys' attitude -- it is familiar to us all today.
-- signed by the nice little woman at the office who does everything, including making the coffee and emptying the trash, for minimum wage, who was told at school she was too dumb to go to University.
About Tuesday 13 February 1665/66
San Diego Sarah • Link
Since Pepys is buyng tallow for the office, I think it was for candles. Until paraffin wax became available (what most candles are made of today), the poor had tallow (which smelt nasty) and the rich had beeswax. Because of the smell, a couple of winters back Pepys had insisted on beeswax candles. Recent economies have changed his lifestyle.
Churches used beeswax candles. The poor used rushes as wicks, making lights for themselves by dipping the rush in melted fat. Burning the candle at both ends meant just that: the rush was twisted up so both ends could be lit at the same time giving twice the light for half the time.
(Beeswax candles are easy to make if you have a good sheet of beeswax with straight edges - you simply put a length of cotton wick in the middle and roll it up, then cut in into sections if you want smaller candles. Cotton wicks give the best light and need to be twisted and doubled in order to not burn down too quickly and outrace the wax and get lost in the candle. But cotton wicks were yet to come.)
Had Pepys been buying tallow "for the King" or the Navy, the Salty One’s previous annotation on its uses would have been more likely: Tallow was important to running of a ship, preservation and cleaning , providing cheap lighting, keeping gun wheels running, and scrubbing decks.
Animal rendering, in other words. What the Joyce Brothers used to do for a living.
About Letitia Vaughan (b. Hooker)
San Diego Sarah • Link
GOOD NEWS: According to Edward Vaughan's Wikipedia page:
"Vaughan married Letitia Hooker, the daughter of Sir William Hooker. Their son John (1670–1721), was created by William III in 1695, baron of Fethard County Tipperary, and viscount Lisburne, in the peerage of Ireland."
So Letitia survived this set back. No word on whether the baby did.
About John Lethieullier
San Diego Sarah • Link
Sir John Lethieullier (1633, London – 4 January 1719, Lewisham) was a British merchant and businessman descended from Huguenots from the Spanish Netherlands. His parents were John le Thieullier and Jane de la Forterie or Delafort, born in Frankfurt and Brabant respectively. He was the eldest of their three sons. John le Thieullier moved to England in 1605. He settled initially in Ilford and then in Lewisham. He began by buying English textiles from East Anglia and the west of England with his business partner Charles Marescoe (husband to John's sister Leonora), superintending their dyeing and finishing and then exporting them to the Levant and southern Europe. He soon diversified and by 1669 was exporting tin and lead to Rotterdam and Venice as well as importing Portuguese sugar and Dutch iron. He became sheriff of London in 1675 and in 1693 bought Aldersbrook Manor in what is now east London. He is buried in the churchyard of St. Alfege Church in Greenwich. He married Anne Hooker at St. Clement's, Eastcheap on 18 May 1659. Their son John was the father of the antiquarian Smart Lethieullier.
For more information: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sir…
About Sir Thomas Hervey (Navy Commissioner, 1665-8)
San Diego Sarah • Link
Sir Thomas Hervey MP 1625-1694 -- Per L&M Companion: kt 1660. Of Ickworth, Suffolk; Vice-Chamberlain of the Household 1658; Extra Commissioner of the Navy 1665-1668; M.P. for Bury St. Edmunds March 1679-1690. His appointment to the Navy Board was a political one and he earns no praise from Pepys. On the other hand, his memorial in Ickworth church - and memorials do not always lie - records that he and his wife were 'most eminent examples of piety, charity and conjugal affection.'
About Sir Thomas Hervey (Navy Commissioner, 1665-8)
San Diego Sarah • Link
Sir Thomas Hervy MP's biography from his time in the Commons:
https://www.historyofparliamenton…
It would be nice to know what he really got up to during the Interregnum to earn favor from Charles II.
About Thursday 26 July 1666
San Diego Sarah • Link
"my Lord Chancellor’s new house"
Edward Hyde, Earl of Clarendon, in his autobiography, admits the "weakness and vanity" he had exhibited in the erection of [Clarendon] house, and "the gust of envy" which it drew upon him; while he attributes his fall more to the fact that he had built such a house than to any misdemeanor he was thought to have been guilty of.
John Wilmot, 2nd Earl of Rochester (Clarendon's second son) told Lord Dartmouth that when his father [CLARENDON] left England he ordered him to tell all his friends "that if they could excuse the vanity and folly of the great house, he would undertake to answer for all the rest of his actions himself." -- London, Past and Present. H.B. Wheatley, 1891.
About Tuesday 6 February 1665/66
San Diego Sarah • Link
Phil and Mary -- I think he's been even more devious than both of you say: He collected samples and gifts ... then invited the office over for a big lunch ... and then returned what he didn't need/like. There's very little new under the sun.
About Sunday 4 February 1665/66
San Diego Sarah • Link
"Apparently Aunt James didn't leave much, Sam not seeming much miffed at not being included."
I suspect Sam was relieved. They won't be asking him for loans for a while.
About Sunday 4 February 1665/66
San Diego Sarah • Link
Weather report for 2019: My cousins near Windsor report snow on the ground, with the first snowdrops poking their brave first sprouts out of the frozen ground.
About Thursday 1 February 1665/66
San Diego Sarah • Link
"... and no dinner provided for me ready ..." The operative word is READY. i.e. 'come back in an hour and you can have dinner at home.'
'But I'm hungry now.'
'Can't be helped -- the chicken was delivered late.'
'Okay ... I'm going out for dinner at Capt. Cocke's.'
'Good idea. I'll let Mrs. Pepys know what happened when she gets home."
About Thursday 1 February 1665/66
San Diego Sarah • Link
As Pepys is so specific about the missing lunch, I suspect there was an unusual miscommunication today. The five staff need to eat, so Elizabeth being out does not necessarily cancel cooking. Pepys has eaten alone in his dining room before, but does not like to do so. Since reading was not a given, sending the boy with a message about lunch was probably more usual than leaving/sending a note. The boy could bring back information. All these options appear to have failed today.
About Ale
San Diego Sarah • Link
Cock ale is different from normal ale: a rooster was cooked in ale, and somehow distilled into a drink which was very popular ... as an aphrodisiac. More on the subject at
https://www.atlasobscura.com/arti…
About Saturday 3rd February 1665/66
San Diego Sarah • Link
"... and then home, all of us, for half an hour to dinner, ,,,"
No wonder he was buying pictures and silverware yesterday. He avoided giving an office party at Christmas, so this was an opportunity to return a lot of hospitality, and show off how well he was doing in a discrete way.
About Wednesday 31 January 1665/66
San Diego Sarah • Link
"we met on extraordinary occasion about the business of tickets." This conversation had been going on for a while:
https://www.pepysdiary.com/diary/…
Wednesday 10 January 1666
"It grieved me to see how slightly the Duke [of Albermarle] do everything in the world, and how the King and everybody suffers whatever he will to be done in the Navy, though never so much against reason, as in the business of recalling tickets, which will be done notwithstanding all the arguments against it."
L&M note: In this, Albemarle was pro and Pepys against the recall of these chits of uncertain value with which seamen had long been paid. I think prudence and equity were on the side of Albemarle, who, as a military man, was concerned about reliable and loyal manpower.
About Tuesday 30 January 1665/66
San Diego Sarah • Link
My feeling is that Charles II "martyred" his father as a way of
1. Dignifying his father's end;
2. Testing what it means to be "Defender of the Faith";
3. Snubbing the Pope who did nothing to aid the Restoration;
4. Reassuring the English Roman Catholics that he had not strayed too far from the fold;
5. Defining the late struggles from the Royalist point of view.
Rather like Eisenhower adding "In God We Trust" to the currency during the Cold War to remind Good Americans why they fought Communism. Nothing like having God on your side of the argument.
About Monday 29 January 1665/66
San Diego Sarah • Link
"One thing I wondered about all through the last year of plague is what happened in Evelyn's infirmaries for prisoners of war. Were there any outbreaks? I would have supposed an outbreak would have been lethal in such conditions. But maybe they didn't contain plague carriers."
Assuming Terry is correct in saying that "Already half the accommodation at three London hospitals (St. Bartholomew's, St. Thomas's and the Savoy) was reserved for the wounded, but the greater number were boarded out" (and he usually is correct), I have to assume they had the plague in the hospitals too.
1. The Dutch had had their own outbreak 2 years earlier, and in the unsanitary coditions on board war ships, it only takes one sick sailor to take down the entire ship.
2. Maybe all these sailors were originally wounded but not plague-ill ... the people coming in to care for them were all exposed to the plague and must have brought it into the hospitals and boarding places.
I don't KNOW this for sure, but I can't imagine a way to isolate these wounded men.
About Tuesday 7 July 1663
San Diego Sarah • Link
Meanwhile, at Whitehall after the cherry eating was over:
https://www.pepysdiary.com/encycl…
Denzil, Baron Holles of Ifield, who was a good French scholar, was sent as ambassador to France on 7 July, 1663. He was ostentatiously English, and a zealous upholder of the national honor and interests; but his position was rendered difficult by the absence of home support.
And I like the A Biographical History of England. J. Granger, 1779 note: "... He refused the insidious presents offered him by Louis XIV with as much disdain as he had before refused 5000 1. offered him by the parliament, to indemnify him for his losses in the civil war.”
I wonder what Louis XIV was trying to bribe him to do. Wrong guy!
Holles had a tough assignment because after the Restoration, Charles II's instincts were to exercise a serious role in European affairs, and his new government was sensitive to unflattering comparisons with the influence which the Commonwealth and Protectorate had wielded abroad, and the Restoration regime was a fragile one. Charles' desire to cut a figure abroad had to be tempered by an appreciation of the costs of international power politics and the threat it could pose to internal security.
Both France and Spain solicited an English alliance.
The Franco-Spanish War had been ended by the Treaty of the Pyrenees in 1659, but the politics of western Europe was still bound up with their continuing rivalry. Plus the Spanish expected some dividends from the support they had given the exiled monarchy in the late 1650s, so in July 1660 Charles II formally ended the war with Spain which had been carried on fitfully since Cromwell's death.
Although Spain had advocates at the English court, it lacked the closeness Charles II's family ties gave him to France, plus it could not overcome Charles’ enthusiasm for French society and government.
Even so, France's 1654 treaty with Cromwell, and Cardinal Mazarin's disrespect of English Royalist interests had chilled relations between the two courts, and not until the death of Cardinal Mazarin in March 1661 did relations officially recover.
But by then the Franco-Dutch Treaty was as good as signed, and Louis XIV found himself reluctantly on the other side of the Anglo-Dutch War. However, as we have seen from the Diary, Louis was in no hurry to honor that Treaty. Presumably it was Hollis' job to keep France "on the fence".